Unpacking Big Ears: The Rest of the Sets

 

This post should get us the rest of the way through the 2026 Big Ears sets that we saw this year. Most years, I don't finish a full recap of the festival, getting either bored or distracted about halfway through, so either I'm getting more disciplined or there's less going on in my life (or both!).

Also, I want to point out that these sets aren't the "also-rans," the mediocre to poor seeds and stems that I'm including just for the sake of completeness. Some of them, like Jeff Parker's Expansion Trio and the Patricia Brennan Septet, were among the best of the weekend, but just didn't fit in with the broad categories of the previous posts.

I might could have put Parker in with the SML post from two weeks ago, as Jeremiah Chiu, the synth player in SML, was a member of the trio, which also included drummer Ben Lumsdaine. I (sadly) missed Parker's ETA IVtet last year, and his spacey, grooved-out set this year by his Expansion Trio was as good a salve as any to make up for my loss.  

The music of Parker is also as good an example as any of the continuing evolution of so-called jazz music. Jazz history has been marked by rebels and innovators, from Charlie Parker upending the swing era with bebop to Miles introducing cool jazz and modal forms to Coltrane opening things up to free jazz and the avan-garde to Miles revolutionizing the form again with electric instruments and jazz fusion. But jazz purists would want to freeze the history sometime in the 1970s and not want to recognize any innovations since then. 

But look at other forms of music, from rock to hip-hop, that have continued to evolve and evolve significantly since then. No one expects hip hop to still be all "hip, hop, don't stop the rockin' to the bang-bang boogie." No one expects rock music to still sound like Billy Joel. Both forms have evolved in so many ways, but why not jazz? Why must it still sound like Duke Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie, like Charles Mingus or Sonny Rollins?

To be sure, that's not what Jeff Parker's about, but his music, while still undeniably "jazz," is moving in directions no one could have anticipated in 1975. The music is rhythmic and beat driven, melodic but not tied to song structure, free but not chaotic. It's centered around the electric guitar, not horns, but doesn't sound anything like Wes or Les. It's 2026 music, lovingly crafted and tastefully presented.           

I also got to see another iconoclastic guitarist who defies any classification or genre - the legendary Fred Frith. There is no telling what to expect from Frith, and I for one didn't expect the notorious improviser to be playing primarily bass, accompanied by accordion, sax, and drums on carefully crafted compositions. I saw Frith a year or two ago at Big Ears improving with a table guitar along with Ikue Mori, and the galactic distance between that set and this is but a hint of the breadth of Frith's universe.

Speaking of guitars, I also caught a set of six guitars but not one single live musician, except for a technician keeping the set going. Lou Reed Drones was a longform, six-hour drone performance curated by Laurie Anderson of guitars from Reed’s collection arranged against a group of amplifiers so that their tuned feedback created a drone of ever-changing harmonics. The sound was deafeningly loud, far louder than this video sample suggests. 

Although set in the same former Greyhound station as the SML performances, it was less than visually compelling - after you took in the arrangement, there wasn't much to see, but I hung around for some 15 minutes before wandering off to find something to eat. I'm still glad I stopped by, though.  

Speaking of drone, the legendary Charlemagne Palestine gave a rare performance at Big Ears this year. I missed his organ recital, but caught his piano piece, where he performed an extended drone of repeated notes with changing overtones and harmonics. His piano and stage were covered by silk fabrics and stuffed animals in front of projections of his own abstract water-color artwork. The piece developed a hypnotic quality and the audience was as rapt and attentive as any I've been a part of.  

One of my most anticipated sets was possibly Patricia Brennan's Septet. The vibraphonist, who I first encountered in Mary Halvorson's Amaryllis band, was joined by trumpeter Adam O’Farrill and saxophonists Mark Shim and Jon Irabagon (who I also saw with Brain Marsella's Imaginarium), along with a bass, a drummer, and a percussionist to give it all an Afro-Cuban flavor. My anticipation was high, and Brennan's high-energy and exciting performance more than met my expectations. This  band swings and swings hard (even though it also sound nothing like what anyone might have imagined in 1975).

Finally, speaking of 1975, the festival concluded (for me at least) with a performance of something called the Miles Electric Band: Celebrating Miles Davis at 100. It was a large, at least ten-person, ensemble and reasonably recreated some of Miles' late 60's and early 70's compositions, although perhaps a tad too faithfully and without much apparent enthusiasm or passion. And why did they include an extended acoustic piano solo in a set of "Electric Miles?" This would have been an exciting discovery had I stumbled across them unexpectedly at some club, but as the final headlining act of Big Ears 2026, well, the festival had delivered far better all weekend.   

Not to say I don't love the music of that period in Miles career. I do. And not to say the musicians weren't talented. They were. But it was a case of the whole being less than the sum of its parts, or possibly that after four days of outstanding musicality, I had become jaded.    

And that was it! Four day, and my seventh year at the Festival. Looking forward to 2027!